Education: Savage Strike in Newark

Urban schools are often so bad that despairing parents no longer care
whether their children attend. Militant blacks blame city
teachersmost of them white, some of them black. Last week these
pressures blocked settlement of a savage teacher strike in Newark,
already the longest in the history of any major U.S. city. As a result,
more than half of Newark's predominantly (80%) black pupils stayed out
of school for the tenth straight week.

Newark's crumbling schools have fallen behind for years. In 1968, only
six out of every 100 pupils were reading above the...